RMV rejects some vanity flair

Margie: Hey Lou, did you hear the one about the guy who couldn't afford personalized plates, so he changed his name to J3L-2404?

Lou: Ya, that's a good one.

-- Fargo (1996)

Think you can become the funniest driver on the road by slapping an offensive vanity license plate on your car?

Better think again.

Words like BTEME, LUVTOY and STONR are just a handful of the 467 personalized plate requests that Massachusetts has rejected since 2004.

Actually, don't THINK at all. That's another vanity-plate request denied by the state.

"Anyone could be offended by anything, but we do our best to try and keep those letter combinations off the road," said Sara Lavoie, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation.

Workers within a "specialty plate department" at the Registry of Motor Vehicles are tasked with approving or denying vanity license-plate requests.

When a request comes in, the team checks it against a "texting abbreviation" handbook to make sure someone isn't trying to put the latest vulgar abbreviation on a plate, said Lavoie. They also consult the Urban Dictionary, a popular website that defines thousands of slang words and phrases.

This explains why requests such as LMFAO, OMGWTF, and ADIDAS, were rejected in recent years.

The team also looks for common words in foreign languages that may be inappropriate. And they make sure someone isn't spelling a vulgar word backwards, so that it can only be read through a rear -view mirror.

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"They are very aware of people trying to pull a fast one," said Lavoie. "What I found very interesting is when they make a decision, and they deny the vanity-plate request, it is very rarely contested by the person who has made the request, because I think they know they were trying to slip one by us and got caught."

There have been cases in which a driver has claimed a seemingly offensive plate request is really innocuous.

A few years ago, for example, a grandmother asked to have FUUFF put on her license plate because she said that's what her grandchildren called her. While that may have been true, Lavoie said the request was denied because the word could have been interpreted as an acronym for something that would make any grandmother blush.

The Registry of Motor Vehicles has strict rules dictating what types of words are not allowed on license plates.

Anything that expresses "fighting words" that could "inflame passions" and possibly lead to a case of road rage is prohibited. Plate requests rejected under this rule include NUKEM, LETHAL, IKEELU, GOTGUN, and yes, even the actual word VIOLENT.

Another plate rejected under the no-violence rule? HANABL -- presumably for its association to crazed serial-killer Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs.

The Registry also will reject plate requests that express contempt, ridicule, or superiority of a race, religion, deity, ethnic heritage, gender, sexual orientation, disability or political affiliation.

Combinations that refer to genitalia or sex acts, or promote the availability for sex, are also off limits. Bad news for the driver who wanted HOOKR on his or her plate.

More broadly, any plate combination that could be considered in poor taste, degrading, or features a swear word not usually displayed in the community for general viewing is banned.

Under these rules, the famous ASSMAN New York license plate that Kramer was accidentally given in a 1995 episode of Seinfeld would be rejected. In the episode the plate turned out to belong to a proctologist.

On the other hand, the KNIGHT license plate belonging to KITT on Knight Rider would likely be approved. Same goes for the LA LAW vanity plate that appeared during the opening credits of L.A. Law.

Dr. Emmett Brown from Back to the Future would not be so lucky. The OUTATIME California license plate featured on the DeLorean time machine would be rejected in Massachusetts for a number of reasons.

First, it has too many characters. Vanity plates in Massachusetts must contain two to six characters.

Second, the letters "I," "O," "Q," and "U" can only be used as part of a word that is clearly defined and correctly spelled. For example, "LQQK" would not be an acceptable registration number because it is not a correctly spelled word.

There are other formatting rules, too.

Numbers cannot be used in the middle of a plate. For example, AAA222 would an acceptable vanity plate, while AAA22A would not. The first number used cannot be a "0."

Also, no periods, spaces, or punctuation marks are allowed.

At $75 per year, vanity plates are not cheap. This could explain why less than 2 percent, or 63,397 of the state's 4.4 million passenger vehicles, have specialized plates.

Some rejected plates, such as the aforementioned THINK, seem harmless. Other seemingly banal plates to have been axed include AGIFT, NGINER, PSSSST and THWACK.

While the Registry of Motor Vehicles could not say why these specific requests were rejected, Lavoie said the department is doing its best to keep the roads free of offensive license plates.

"We're trying to have lots of generational knowledge and pop-culture knowledge to try to prevent anything inappropriate from getting out there," she said.

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